The Republican leaders brought their senior staff—Jackson, Loper, Stombres and Bradley. Biden, Geithner, Lew and Nabors sat in for the administration. They were close on a draft plan, Obama said, as he rattled off various cuts and savings. They were close on the cuts to the non-Defense, nonsecurity and nonentitlement spending. They hadn’t settled on the final discretionary number, on language for entitlement reform, or the all-important trigger. And the Gang of Six, Obama said, has made this more complicated on the revenue front. Your buddy Saxby, he said to Boehner, has put me in a hard position. “Revenue,” Boehner said. “Mr. President, our necks are out as far as they can go.” The “up to” $800 billion was it, the upper limit. Nabors worried that they were again talking past each other. Boehner kept calling it $800 billion but the Republicans were going to say it was all through tax reform and so it would effectively be zero. How was the president going to sell what House Republicans would call zero revenue to Democrats when conservative Senate Republicans like Chambliss, Coburn and Crapo said they needed at least to get $1.2 trillion in revenue?
